Fox News Latino is publishing a series of articles examining the effects of last year’s border surge on communities, schools, and the unaccompanied minors themselves. Below is an excerpt of the first installment:
More than a year since arriving in the United States, risking a 1,500-mile journey from his native El Salvador at the age of 14, the day arrived when Saul Martinez Ortiz would learn whether he would get to call this country home, or would have to return to Central America.
Saul, now 16, was at the Suffolk County District Court, in Long Island, New York, waiting to go before County District Court Judge Deborah Poulos. He has no parent in El Salvador able or willing to care for him, and lives in New York with his mother, an undocumented immigrant who fled an abusive partner in 2007.
Saul, a tall, thin soft-spoken youth who’s made painstaking efforts to learn English, was part of the more than 100,000 unaccompanied minors who traversed Central America and were handed off from smuggler to smuggler to reach the U.S. in recent years.
The judge eventually found his story credible and told him he can now call the United States home. He’s one of the lucky ones – because he found a lawyer who would take his case. Of those who had legal representation, three-quarters of the children who have come to the U.S. since the border surge began in 2012 have been granted permission to stay in the United States, according toSyracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse
. Of those without lawyers, 80 percent have been ordered deported, the TRAC report
